


How the Mighty Fall (In Love)

by Villainyandgoodcheekbones



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Everybody and their mother has a “how the Kaidanovskys met" fic/drabble/cobbled-together gifset, F/M, Gen, I know, this one, this one however is mine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-01
Updated: 2013-08-01
Packaged: 2017-12-22 02:38:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/907901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Villainyandgoodcheekbones/pseuds/Villainyandgoodcheekbones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He’s 7 years younger and already so much taller, twice her weight,  and nothing like her brother.</p><p>And they are Drift Compatible.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How the Mighty Fall (In Love)

They are not young. They are seventeen, eighteen, twenty one, two but they are not young. Time is a dimension, and the dimensions are torn now, one bleeding into the other, and there are monsters. They are not young. But they  _are_  only seventeen, eighteen, twenty one, two, and so she lets a coy smile curl across her red red lips and murmurs “God  _bless_ Siberia”, looking across at the knot of fresh, wind-chapped faces coming in out of the Vladivostok winter and toying idly with the remains of a dinner roll so hard it’s entirely possible that the rumors are true, that they really are weaponized, designed to act as ammunition against the Kaiju. “Look at that one.”, that one, head and shoulders and a significant portion of chest above the others, dark hair thick on his jaw, almost geologically massive.

“I see him.” drawls the woman across the table, eyebrows raised. “And when you abandon me for some hulking peasant with fists like boulders, then I will be forced to tell everyone about it. Aleksandra Grigoryevna Asterinova, pride of the Academy, will leave her best friends for mountainous farm-boys.”

She laughs, red red lips parted around her teeth, “Oh, Anuska. I would never.”

“Ignore my sister, Anna Ivanovna. She is a vicious liar, and  _he_  is sixteen years old.” And  Nikolai Grigoryevich Asterinov flicks his bright blonde hair from his eyes, sliding in next to his sister. “His name is Kaidanovsky”

“ _Sixteen?_ ”

“My hand to God. Sixteen years old, Aleksi Nikolaivitch Kaidanovsky. I hear his family’s circus.”

Anna laughs delightedly. “Circus! You’re in luck, Sasha. Do you suppose he knows any tricks?”

The rolls are, without a doubt, weaponized. Hers taps hollowly against her metal plate, and Sasha huffs, shoulders ruffling the fur collar of her parka as she laughs ruefully. “Hmph. Must be good for   _something_  if they let him in so young. Well done, Kadianovsky”

~x~

“Well done, Kadianovsky”

“Hm?”

“They’ve caught you staring.”

Aleksis frowns. “They aren’t even—”

“Doesn’t matter.” His name is Kirill, call me Kirya, everyone does, and there are a handful of nuts and washers threaded through his heavy dreadlocks, pulled back from his smooth, dark face. Engineering track, he’d announced cheerfully, like a part of his name. “Those are the Asterinovs. See him?”  and he jerks his chin across the room, towards a man with wild, dandelion hair combed back from his face to curl across his collar, hands swooping back and forth like pale birds. “Nikolai Grigoryevitch. He knows everything. And anything he doesn’t, his sister finds out. Aleksandra.” Across the room, she smiles, like she can hear them, leaning over to let her friend light her cigarette. She is, Aleksis notes with a kind of awe, very beautiful, but he cannot help but think that she looks very cold, so cold it would burn to touch her.  “She can get you anything,” Kirill continues. “They belong to  _Cherniy_.”

His tongue sits like lead in his mouth, all in knots, but something in him must be talking, questioning, since Kirill says “It’s like this: unless you design them specially  for one team, in theory, any pair of pilots  _could_  work any Jaeger. That’s the theory. But in practice—”

This, at least, is familiar ground. “The machines choose.”

“You’d be surprised how many people don’t pick up on that. You ever get tired of pretending to be a pilot, Kaidanovsky, you come see us in Engineering. We could use a man like you.”

He can feel his fists tighten, feel the heat rising in his throat, and Aleksis can  _feel_  himself pulling his shoulders back, straightening his spine— but then everyone will see, and things will be like before, so he forces himself to slouch, and smile instead. “I’ll keep it in mind” he rumbles.

Almost like she can hear him, Aleksandra Asterinova laughs.

~x~

The Vladivostok Shatterdome is hot, the damp, claustrophobic heat of too many people and not enough space, but it’s never quite hot  _enough_ , so everyone sweats inside their coats, and smokes to keep their hands from freezing. And it’s dark, a lit only with a dim coppery light, dotted with cigarette embers and soldering irons.

But Aleksis can still remember driving, days on the road in between shows when it was so cold and bright outside that you could go blind for whole minutes, whole hours at a time. It got so bright, glittering and hard everywhere you looked, like diamonds, and your eyes watered, tears freezing in the whites of your eyes before they fell.  And you couldn’t look away, because your eyes had frozen open. The Asterinovs, he thinks, are like that. You could go blind watching. Like now, watching them whirl around each other like a snowstorm, staves  _cracking_  loudly blow-for-blow,  both of them so alike they might as well be be twins, might as well be the same person , for all that there’s three years between them. When the instructor finally calls a halt, they’re mirrored exactly, her staff resting along the line of her little brother’s shoulder, his pointed at his sister’s throat.

Perfect physical compatibility.

Which is the furthest thing possible from what Aleksis feels, too big in his skin, too tall, too young, too afraid to hit too hard, too breathless from hitting the floor, knocked down over and over again. The Asteinvos, both of them, prowl around the edges of the room, watching him fall.

“You’re holding back too much.”

Seen from the floor, upside down, her face looks like a flag snapping in the wind, white and red lips and blue eyes. “Don’t.”

Aleksis nods, and her staff taps once, lightly, against his hip. “Good. Now get up, Kaidanovsky. You’re not finished yet.”

~x~

He’s good. Part of him relishes the expressions on their faces, again and again, watching him succeed. And the months go by, until another part wants to knock their teeth out for being so surprised. Aleksis repairs six radios, screwdriver dwarfed in his hand, and swims lap after lap in a pool so heavily chlorinated he can hardly breathe until the urge passes. Kol–Nikolai, he’s not Kolya, not to Aleksis, is there, sometimes, comes in with Sa–Aleksandra, she is Aleksandra to him, however much he may  _want_  her to be Sasha. And the first time it happens, Aleksis nods to himself, thinking of course, this is why they have such blonde hair; he can feel his own starting to bleach. But only one of them slips in,  twisting under the glassy water, while the other strides away with a clicking of boots and dog tags. Nikolai Grigoryevitch Asterinov shakes the water from his hair, looking for all the world as if he’d like nothing better than to drag a man under, just to see,  _rusalka_  with his thin white legs thrashing. Aleksis says nothing, but Nikolai laughs and answers anyway.

“My sister doesn’t swim.”

It’s the only time he’s ever seen them apart.

At all other times, they are together, have always been together, will always be. They were always, will always be that way, a pair of those children, not quite rich but not quite poor, who are, for some undefinable reason, slightly feral, united against everyone and everything else. When she is ten years old, a boy calls her brother names, pulls his too-long hair for three weeks and she is sent to the teachers to be punished because she blacks his eye and rips his jacket. He had a ring, his father’s, a lucky lion-headed ring that he clutched under his chin while he sobbed,  _tattled_. And she walked home, unrepentant, Kolya’s hand in hers, and her baby brother, her Kolya, he slipped the same ring in between their two palms, and it’s the first thing they see every time, after “Neural Handshake Initiated.”

This is their third training simulation this week. They’re almost graduated, about to be sent out. They plug in the last wires, hers into her  right shoulder, his into his left, at the same time.

There is less dissonance, they claim, for the ones who are related. There are more things shared.

They are, of course, wrong. There is not as much dissonance, true. But there is enough.

_Papa works for the government, and years later she will think that perhaps everyone in Moscow works for the government, but now she is still still Sashka, twelve years old and all she knows is that Papa takes his case of papers and leaves every morning, and comes home late, and Mamochka says your father works for the government. Later, when Mamochka is gone, lost in waves and Kaiju blue because Auntie wanted to see her again before  the baby came, so she flew out to San Fransisco, all the way in America; later, Sasha will be grateful that he works for the government. That is what taught them the power of a good show, and knowing people, collecting favors owed. That is why they dye their hair to match exactly, for the show, and carefully dial the numbers they know from the papers they “borrow” from Papa. But when she is twelve, Sashka knows none of this, only that Papa works for the government. And today, today it is almost Christmas,  but Papa will not be home before then, and Mamochka is busy, but they are skating at the river. That is what you do at Christmas._

_ice and the ice is too thin and it’s black, black, and she’s under, and he’s under ; Sasha knows that this is drowning but Sashka only knows that she is afraid, and cannot feel his hand any more and  it’s black then it’s bright. Everyone is shouting, thank God someone saw they say, and she says Kolya, Kolya is still under, where is Kolya, where is my brother–_

_–they pull him up, not breathing, and  pound on his chest like she’s seen in the movies and Kolya doesn’t wake up. And that’s wrong, Sasha knows it’s wrong; Kolya woke up. Sashka was shaking and scared but he woke up, and Sasha tries so hard to tell him “It’s a memory! Kolya, **Kolya** , it’s not real, it’s a memory, Kolya wake up! Wake–”_

up.

She falls out of the Drift, and knows he’s already gone; there are med techs ripping him out of the wires, hair sweat-soaked and wild around his face from how hard they tear the helmet off him. There is blood dripping from his nose, and more in his eyes. They wheel him away, and it is only because she cannot bear to lose  _Cherniy_  as well that Sasha keeps herself from screaming. Her fists are clenched, lion-headed ring digging into her hand so hard the edges draw blood.

~x~

Nikolai Grigoryevitch Asterinov is given a state funeral, which his sister does not attend, because she is standing barefoot, staff in hand, white tank top and grey fatigue pants and her red red lipstick up in front of  a room of men, women, anyone who might fit, because they lost Kolya, and now they can’t afford to lose her, too. Even if they expect to, and they all expect to.

They are calling her unstable, pretending that if they couch it in “might be”, it’s not an insult.

They are burying her brother. She will not suffer insults, not today.

Sasha is not unstable, her hands and her steps are steady (flatlined, she thinks) but the first three people they send up against her last all of a heartbeat (less, if she’s honest) before she has them on the ground. They want to replace Kolya, and she refuses to be replaced, so she allows them to keep sending up another body for her to sweep aside. They cannot replace Kolya. But they can give his seat to another, but only if they  _deserve_  it.

Not a one of them has spoken to her, not a word, until  _he_  steps up, ducking his head like he‘s half the size he is, murmuring “I’m sorry” in a voice like an avalanche. “That was my father’s name, too, Niko _–_ ”

He only just gets his staff up in time as she snarls “I don’t give a  _shit_  what your father’s name was, Kaidanovsky!”

He’s holding back, she can tell; when the bottom end of her staff stabs up towards the soft underside of chin, he only steps back, jerking his own across his chest to block the next strike. But that’s all, when he could, when he  _should,_ be hitting her back.  

“Haven’t we talked about this?” They call the first point hers, staff extended, resting alongside his temple.

Belatedly, it occurs to Aleksis that today is his birthday, and her brother’s funeral, and there is no good way for this to end. There’s no point holding anything back; the damage is already done. On her next swing, he steps back out of her reach, and counters, and her staff cracks in half from the force of the blow.

And it rips something that’s half a gasp, half a growl from her throat as she comes at him again with a broken length in each hand. He’s too busy countering the high strike from her right hand that he doesn’t notice her left until his knee explodes into a sudden crunch of pain and he goes down, staff abandoned, groping blindly for her ankle. He finds it; she goes down snarling and twists away, then somehow she’s got one knee on his chest, pressing down, and he can feel smooth wood, still warm from her hands, cutting off his air. He can’t breathe.

So Aleksis watches her breathe, chest heaving, sweat gleaming on her collarbone. Her head is bowed, eyes shut, and it’s almost religious, the way she bears down on him until it’s over and he can breathe as she pushes herself up and off of him.

“Get up, Kaidanovsky. We’re not finished yet.”

Someone tosses her another staff, which she catches one-handed. Aleksis climbs back to his feet.

She’s hitting to hurt, and he knows it, and he knows that he is, too. He knows she wants to break him, and Aleksis wants to break her, like rock a breaks a wave, knows he will see her shattered, just like he knows that in time, she will see him ground into the dirt. And suddenly he knows that  _she_  knows, that they are trading blow for blow in perfect, mirrored motion, that they have been all along.

He’s 7 years younger and already so much taller, twice her weight,  and nothing like her brother.

And they are Drift Compatible.

~x~

She never wanted it to be him. She was so prepared to hate, to  _despise_  whoever it was that managed to replace Kolya, so ready to believe that if she hated them  _enough_ , it would be almost like loving them, and that would be enough to Drift.

He’s too hard to hate. She wants to hate him for his  _stupid_  name, just different enough, like that makes him special, for the way he curls into himself when he walks, until she finds herself forced to drawl “You ashamed to be seen with me, Kaidanovsky?” and make him stand straight. She wants especially to hate the way his coat stretches across his shoulders when he does.

Aleksis Kaidanovsky, she thinks, has spent his whole life learning how to keep people from hating him.

Their first time Drifting together is, predictably, a disaster (like most are) although not for the reasons everyone expected.

They have mandated grief counseling for her (So sorry for your loss, do you often think of your brother?), talk sessions for him (accelerated through the program so fast, how are you coping?), and before they even start the Drift, before they even have the suits on, the psychologist is there to meet them. She has grey in her hair, scraped tightly back, affecting a white coat and glasses. The only thing about her that seems human are the incongruously red mittens covering both hands from wrist to the first joint of her fingers.

“Don’t be surprised,” she says, voice too bright and loud in the hangar, “if it seems difficult at first. You are both very new to each other. You mustn’t blame yourselves if things don’t fall into place right away.”

Her mouth keeps moving, Sasha has stopped watching, glancing sidelong at Aleksis, one eyebrow raised. He offers her a tiny, half-shrug in reply.  _What can you do?_

What she does is walk away, snatching her newly-re-circuited jumpsuit off its hook, stripping off jacket, shirt, both boots.  It’s too far to the alcoves they have set aside for changing, and it’s not like he would look, because—

She realizes almost too late that the man behind her is not her brother, that instead she is standing in front of a stranger (with whom she is inordinately, necessarily intimate, but a stranger nonetheless) wearing only a plain sports bra and clinging shorts, neither of which, she knows, are flattering; the waistband digs into her hips, her chest is pushed to near-flat, and this is only practical, but goosebumps are breaking on her stomach and arms and Sasha closes her eyes.

~x~

He knows, distantly, that he is blushing furiously; Aleksis can feel the heat flooding his face and his chest, and realizes almost too late that he must be staring. Sasha closes her eyes.

Opens them, one hip cocked and her eyebrow following, with her arms crossed under her breasts. “And what did you expect? Lace? Who do I have here to wear lace for, Kaidanovsky? _You?_ ” He might be imagining it, but as she pulls the suit on, he thinks he might have seen her smile, just a little.

“Initiating Neural Handshake….”

_the radios never work unless he’s there, since nobody else ever learned to fix them, so he fixes them, because radios do not whisper behind your back. And lions do not whisper, either, and they, unlike everything else, make him feel small, so he is sitting with the radios with the lions._

_he doesn’t understand what he’s hearing, will not understand it until he sneaks into a bar in Moscow, and sees them on the flickering TV behind the counter; the colours have slid out of adjustment and everything, everything is Kaiju blue. He sees monsters. He thinks then, ‘like me.’_

_and sixteen then, he is sixteen, in the army so he can get into the program, the truck is stalled, his hands are freezing, but he can’t stop but it **hurts**_   _and_

it’s been almost two hours.

Someone is tugging on the lip of the steel plating over his chest. Aleksis leans forward automatically, lets them push his jaw left then right then left, shining a penlight into his eyes.

“How deep were you? We tried calling you but we couldn’t get through–”

Lipstick on his lips, but it’s not on his lips, it’s on hers, and Sasha is rubbing her palm across her jaw, like there’s something missing there.

Aleksis swallows, and watches Sasha’s throat bob.

~x~

Their second time Drifting he sees lions, and she sees a lion’s head on a ring, but they run _Cherniy_  through his paces (Jaegers are not an  _it_ ) with no further incident.

The third time, he finds himself remembering and remembering the dip of her belly into the waistband of black running shorts, clinging tight to her hips, her red mouth, her knee on his chest, and when he takes the helmet off he can’t quite look her in the eye.

Aleksis is only human, and only seventeen, it’s not like he hasn’t thought about–

but never with  _her_ , she’s too… _everything_ , too much to imagine.

But he’s imagining, thinking of that scar on the back of her wrist, and realizing that she is not as pale as he thought, and never has been. They’re sparring again, and her knee is pressing down on his chest, but instead of the worn canvas of her fatigues, his shirt, all he can feel is skin.  She is warmer than he thought.

He is not, despite how Kirill-call-me-Kirya teases, a virgin. But his hands on her hips are trembling, and the strange thing, the strangest thing, is that unlike every other dream he has ever had, it doesn’t stop, and he doesn’t know what to do. Her hands are hot on his wrists; she smiles redly and shakes her head.

“Stop. Stop shaking.”

It almost hurts, how good it feels to have her laughing, straddling his waist. “You couldn’t break me if you tried.”

She is his partner, his co-pilot, she wouldn’t lie to him. She can’t.

He doesn’t know anymore what to do with his hands until she  _moves_  them, sliding one up the impossibly soft skin of her ribs until the curve of his thumb and index finger is slotted just under her breast. She tells him to sit up; his other hand finds the small of her back as he does.

~x~

He’s seventeen, but she’s dreaming, so it doesn’t matter. Anyway, they could all be dead tomorrow, or tonight, or they might already be dead, in their suits, in the Jaeger, so why keep worrying that he’s so much younger?

She’s only human. And Sasha wants to hate him for the width of his shoulders, for the days when the circuited jumpsuit hangs at his hips, sleeves dangling around his thighs,  (and he’ll try to knot them around his waist while the engineers squawk that he’s ruining the wiring) but in her dream his hands are shaking and she can’t.

He would be like this, she thinks. He would let her—

And she drags him up by the shoulders until he’ sitting upright, and she will never,  _never_ tell the Aleksis who isn’t a dream that he has a chest like a mountain range, and that she could sit pressed to the heat of it for geologic ages, or that any minute now, the scratch of his hair against her breasts is going to force her to kiss him.

To save her dignity, she drags his head down to her neck, fingers carding through his hair, and presses his mouth against her pulse.

~x~

She pulls his head down, presses his face into her neck, and Aleksis mouths wordlessly against her pulse, half kisses, half her name. On sudden impulse he swipes the flat of his tongue over her skin, tasting salt, and inches his thumb up over her nipple. He hears Sasha hiss though her teeth, and his hand freezes, caught like a mouse before a hawk.

“ _Aleksis._ ” She growls, swiveling her hips in his lap “Stop. Holding. Back.”

They let him into the Jaeger Program at only sixteen years old. He learns quickly.

So he learns that the curses are encouragement, that he can make her gasp and that she likes the press of his calluses between her legs because she threatens to gut him with a nail file if he stops. She pulls his hair, and he wants it to sting for days.

~x~

She doesn’t often dream. But this, of course, is a dream, because she would never curl against Aleksis Nikolaivitch Kaidanovsky like a cat, never tuck her head under his chin and close her eyes, waiting to wake up.

~x~

He doesn’t want to wake up.

God help him, but he doesn’t want to wake up.

~x~

They call it “ghost-drifting”, a lingering neural connection, manifested in shared dreams and  in the way that, the morning after, she finds herself moving aside along the table to let him sit before he’s even aware that he wants to, and how he is already sliding her a cup of coffee (black, sweet, scaldingly hot) before she can think that she needs one.

They don’t talk about it.

She blasts Ukrainian Hard House through  _Cherniy’s_  comms system, bass so loud the wires shake, and all he says is “The third album is better.”

Sasha laughs.

The deeper the bond, the better you fight, and they are moving exactly the same, don’t even say anything half the time, even outside the conn pod, just shared looks over people’s heads and impossible wins at poker.

The engineers hate them.

And it becomes a game, sitting inside  _Cherniy’s_  conn pod, one bottle of vodka, two of beer. Drink for everything you get wrong, make other drink for whatever you get right.

And he has to drink twice to her once, since he is a mountain, and it’s only fair.

Her favourite color is yellow; the scar on her wrist is from the only bar fight she has ever been caught at; she has been “quitting smoking” for the past year and a half.

He cannot, to this day, ride a bicycle, but he can repair one; he told the army he was eighteen when he joined, but couldn’t bring himself to lie to PPDC; he has no feeling in the smallest finger of his left hand.

By now they are both drunk, and it’s come to “What did you do, before?”

“You’re too tall for a dancer,” Aleksis murmurs, rolling a bottle between his hands. Sasha snorts.

“Smarter than you look.” Her legs are crossed at the ankles, feet bare. “Circus….strongman?”

“I was fourteen.”

Her throat bobs as she swallows, and Sasha thumbs a drop off of her lower lip with a huff.  “If you would kindly stop reminding me how  _disgustingly_  young you are.  Christ, I feel like an old woman.”

“You’re not an old woman,” he offers.  And Sasha laughs.

“Clumsy.  Very clumsy; good sentiment, terrible execution.”  She tips her head back, gesturing expansively with her bottle.  “Go on then, circus boy. Show me a trick.”

It’s been years since he last did this, and there might not be–

but there’s  _just_  enough room, so he unfolds up to his feet and rolls his shoulders once, then again, and falls forward into a handstand. He is not at all showing off, not even when he slowly lifts one hand off the floor on the pretext of tugging the hem his shirt back up from where it’s fallen over his face.

Sasha uncrosses her legs, and snaps one heel into his wrist, laughing so hard now that she rolls over onto her side, knees to her chest while he falls.

“I’m sorry,” she giggles. “I’m sorry.”

She isn’t.

He contemplates grabbing her then, like some kind of petty revenge, but she moves before he can, pulling his head into her lap.

“I should dye your hair,” she murmurs. “While you’re asleep. Just to be stupid and childish.”

They are due to be sent out in a week, and he knows that she means   _one last time_  and because there no else to be stupid and childish with, and this is, in its way, the kindest thing she has ever done for him.

He beats her to it.

He slides her a cup of coffee the next morning (black, sweet, scaldingly hot) before she’s even realized she needs one, and when she looks up, his hair is blonde.


End file.
